An autonomous robot is a robot that is capable of operating completely on its own by considering its situation in its environment and deciding what actions to take in order to achieve its goals without human intervention. A robot is adaptive if it is capable of improving its ability to achieve its goals.
An adaptive autonomous robot must be capable of sensing and interacting with its environment. Therefore, a robot must include sensors and actuators. A sensor is any device capable of generating a signal that can be mapped to a characteristic of the environment. A sensor may be a proprioceptive sensor that measures an internal aspect of the robot such as, for example, the angle formed by two members at a joint or the angular speed of a motor shaft. A sensor may be an exteroceptive sensor that measures an aspect external to the robot such as, for example, the intensity of light from a direction or the presence of a force applied to the robot. An actuator is any device enabling the robot, in whole or in part, to perform an action. The physical state of the robot may be described by an (S+A)-dimensional state vector, R(t), where S is the dimensionality of the robot's sensor data and A is the dimensionality of the robot's actuator controllers. The state vector, R(t), is the only information accessible to the robot. In addition to sensors, actuators, and mechanical support structures, a robot must have one or more computers capable of receiving signals from the sensors, transmitting commands to the actuators, and executing one or more programs.
The task of building an adaptive autonomous robot is sufficiently complex that research groups have partitioned the problem into several more manageable tasks and have concentrated on solving each task independently of the others. Three tasks or behaviors are considered to be the most difficult in robotics; learning, planning, and world representation.
Initial efforts to implement these behaviors in robots were concentrated on building a complex program that processed environmental information from sensors and generated commands to actuators resulting in behaviors that resembled learning, planning, and abstraction (in order to represent the robot's world, or surroundings) in humans.
Although efforts to build a single, complex control program continue, many of the new and exciting advancements in robotics are based upon the rejection of the notion that complex behavior requires a complex control program. Instead, control is distributed to many interacting autonomous agents. Agents are small programs that act independently of other agents while interacting with the other agents. Complex behavior, such as learning or abstraction, emerge from the interaction of many independent agents rather than being controlled by any one agent.
Mataric and Brooks, “Learning a Distributed Map Representation Based on Navigation Behaviors,” in “Cambrian Intelligence: the early history of the new AI,” The MIT Press, 1999, demonstrated that complex behaviors, such as goal-directed navigation, could emerge from the interaction of simpler behaviors termed “reflexes.” A reflex is an agent that couples an actuator signal to a sensor signal. For example, an avoid reflex may generate a signal to a wheel motor based on a signal from a proximity sensor. If the proximity sensor senses an object within a danger zone of the robot, the reflex generates a signal to stop the wheel motor. Mataric and Brooks showed that starting with only four reflexes, goal-directed navigation could emerge from their interaction. The reflexes, however, were not generated by the robot but required hand-coding by a programmer.
Pfeifer, R. and C. Scheier, “Sensory-motor coordination: the metaphor and beyond,” Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Special Issue on “Practice and Future of Autonomous Agents,” vol. 20, No. 2-4, pp. 157-178, 1997 showed that signals from the sensors and actuators tended to cluster for repeated tasks and termed such clustering category formation via Sensory Motor Coordination (“SMC”). Cohen has shown that robots can partition the continuous data stream received from sensors into episodes that can be compared to other episodes and clustered to form an exemplar episode. An exemplar episode is representative of the cluster of several episodes and may be determined by averaging over the episodes comprising each cluster. The exemplar episode is self-generated (by the robot) and replaces the external programmer. As the robot is trained, the robot will identify a set of exemplar episodes that may be used to complete an assigned task. The ability of the robot to identify episodes from a continuous sensor data stream and to create “categories” (exemplar episodes) from the clustered episodes may be considered to be a rudimentary form of robotic learning.
In order to gather a sufficient number of episodes for the identification of categories, the robot must be trained. Training is normally accomplished by a reinforcement learning (“RL”) technique as will be known to those skilled in the art. In one example of RL, the robot is allowed to randomly generate actions while a trainer rewards actions that move the robot toward a desired goal. The rewards reinforce the most recent actions of the robot and over time, episodes corresponding to the rewarded actions will begin to cluster as similar actions are rewarded similarly. The training, however, requires many repetitions for each action comprising the desired task.
An autonomous robot must be able to select an action that will lead to or accomplish its desired goal. One known method for robot planning involves a spreading activation network (“SAN”), a set of competency modules (“CM”) that, when linked together, initiate a sequence of commands that the robot may perform to accomplish the desired goal. A competency module includes information characterizing the state of the robot both before (state pre-conditions) and after (state post-conditions) a command to an actuator. Competency modules are linked by matching the state pre-conditions of one CM to the state post-conditions of another CM.
Planning begins by first identifying all terminal CMs, defined as CMs having state post-conditions corresponding to the state of the robot after accomplishment of the assigned goal. The state pre-conditions of each of the terminal CMs are then used to find other CMs having state post-conditions matching the state pre-conditions of the terminal CMs. The process is repeated until the state pre-conditions of a CM correspond to the present state conditions of the robot.
In one method of searching for the shortest path to a goal, each CM is assigned an activation value determined by CMs in contact (matching endpoints) with the CM. The order of execution is determined by the activation value of each CM where the CM with the largest activation value is executed next.
As the number of CMs increases, the time required to complete the search increases very rapidly and the reaction time of the robot increases until the robot is unable to respond to the dynamic changes in its environment. While such a search may be acceptable for planning before beginning a task, the exponential increase of the search time as more CMs are added (i.e. as the robot learns) renders such a search unsuitable for real-time response to the robot's changing environment.
The back-propagation of CM linking creates an unavoidable delay in the robot's responsiveness because the robot cannot begin to execute the linked CMs until the complete chain of CMs taking the robot from its present state to the goal state are found. This unavoidable delay limits the operating environments of the robots to situations that are usually predictable.
Therefore there remains a need for an efficient method for robotic planning capable of reacting to sudden or dynamic situations in the robot's environment while allowing for the addition of CMs as the robot learns.
In robots, as well as humans, the amount of sensory information received greatly exceeds the processing capability of the robot. In order to function in any environment, a robot must be able to condense the voluminous sensor data stream to a data rate that its processors can handle while retaining information critical to the robot's operation. In one method of condensing the sensor data stream, the robot builds a representation of the robot's environment (the world model) and compares the received sensory information to the representation stored by the robot. The world model allows the robot to orient itself in its environment and allows for rapid characterization of the sensory data to objects in the world model.
The world model may be allocentric or may be ego-centric. An allocentric world model places objects in a coordinate grid that does not change with the robot's position. An ego-centric model is always centered on the present position of the robot. One example of an ego-centric model is described in Albus, J. S., “Outline for a theory of intelligence”, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man, and Cybern., vol. 21, no. 3, 1991. Albus describes an Ego-Sphere wherein the robot's environment is projected onto a spherical surface centered on the robot's current position. The Ego-Sphere is a dense representation of the world in the sense that all sensory information is projected onto the Ego-Sphere. Albus' Ego-Sphere is also continuous because the projection is affine. The advantage of the Ego-Sphere is its complete representation of the world and its ability to account for the direction of an object. The Ego-Sphere, however, still requires processing of the sensory data stream into objects and a filtering mechanism to distinguish important objects from unimportant objects. Furthermore, Albus does not disclose or suggest any method for using the Ego-Sphere to develop an action plan for the robot, nor is there a suggestion to link the Ego-Sphere to the learning mechanism of the robot.
Another example of an ego-centric model is the Sensory Ego Sphere (SES) described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,697,707 which is incorporated by reference herein. Again, the robot's environment is projected onto a spherical surface centered on the robot's current position. More particularly, in one embodiment, the SES is structured as a geodesic dome, which is a quasi-uniform triangular tessellation of a sphere into a polyhedron. A geodesic dome is composed of twelve pentagons and a variable number of hexagons that depend on the frequency (or tessellation) of the dome. The frequency is determined by the number of vertices that connect the center of one pentagon to the center of another pentagon, all pentagons being distributed on the dome evenly. Illustratively, the SES has a tessellation of 14 and, therefore, 1963 nodes.
The SES facilitates the detection of events in the environment that simultaneously stimulate multiple sensors. Each sensor on the robot sends information to one or more sensory processing modules (SPMs) designed to extract specific information from the data stream associated with that sensor. The SPMs are independent of each other and run continuously and concurrently on preferably different processors. Each SPM sends information messages to an SES manager agent which stores the data, including directional sensory information if available, in the SES. In particular, sensory data is stored on the sphere at the node closest to the origin of the data (in space). For example, an object that has been visually located in the environment is projected onto the sphere at azimuthal and elevation angles that correspond to the pan and tilt angles of the camera-head when the object was seen. A label that identifies the object and other relevant information is stored into a database. The vertex on the sphere closest to an object's projection becomes the registration node, or the location where the information is stored in the database. Each message received by the SES manager is also given a time stamp indicating the time at which the message was received.
The SES eliminates the necessity of processing the entire spherical projection field to find items of interest. Processing the entire projection field is very time consuming and decreases the robot's ability to respond quickly to dynamic changes in its environment. Significant events are quickly identified by the SES by identifying the most active areas of the SES. Processing resources are only used to identify objects at the most active areas and are not wasted on uninteresting or irrelevant areas of the projection field. Furthermore, the SES is able to fuse or associate independent sensor information written to the same vertex at little additional cost (in terms of computing resources) because each SPM writes to the SES independently of each other.
In one embodiment, the vertices of the SES are distributed uniformly over the spherical surface such that nearest-neighbor distances for each vertex are roughly the same. Discretization of the continuous spherical surface into a set of vertices enables the SES agents to quickly associate independent SPM information based on the direction of each sensor source. The selection of the size of the SES (the number of vertices) may be determined by one of skill in the art by balancing the increased time delay caused by the larger number of vertices against the highest angular resolution of the robot's sensors. In a preferred embodiment, the vertices are arranged to match the vertices in a geodesic dome structure.
FIG. 1 is an illustrative diagram of the SES reproduced from FIG. 3 of the '707 Patent. In FIG. 1, the SES is represented as a polyhedron 300. The polyhedron 300 comprises planar triangular faces 305 with a vertex 310 defining one corner of the face. In the polyhedron of FIG. 1, each vertex has either five or six nearest-neighbor vertices and nearest-neighbor distances are substantially the same although tessellations producing a range of nearest-neighbor distances are also within the scope of the present invention. The SES is centered on the current location of the robot, which is located at the center 301 of the polyhedron. Axis 302 defines the current heading of the robot, axis 304 defines the vertical direction with respect to the robot, and axis 303, along with axis 302 define the horizontal plane of the robot.
An object 350 is projected onto the SES by a ray 355 connecting the center 301 to the object 350. Ray 355 intersects a face 360 at a point 357 defined by azimuthal angle, φs, and elevation (or polar) angle, θs. Information about the object 350, such as φs and θs are stored at the vertex 370 that is closest to point 357.
In one embodiment, the SES is implemented as a multiply-linked list of pointers to data structures each representing a vertex on the tessellated sphere. Each vertex record contains pointers to the nearest-neighbor vertices and an additional pointer to a tagged-format data structure (TFDS). The TFDS is a terminated list of objects; each object consisting of an alphanumeric tag, a time stamp, and a pointer to a data object. The tag identifies the sensory data type and the time stamp indicates when the data was written to the SES. The data object contains the sensory data and any function specifications such as links to other agents associated with the data object. The type and number of tags that may be written to any vertex is unrestricted.
The SES may be implemented as a database using standard database products such as Microsoft Access® or MySQL®. An agent to manage communications between the database and other system components may be written in any of the programming languages, such as Basic or C++, known to one of skill in the art.
In one embodiment, the database is a single table that holds all registered information. The manager communicates with other agents in the control system and relays the requests generated to the database. The manager can receive one of four types of requests from any agent: post data, retrieve data using data name, retrieve data using data type and retrieve data using location. The post function takes all relevant data from the requesting agent and registers these data in the database at the correct vertex location. Relevant data includes data name, data type and the tessellation frequency at which the data should be registered. The vertex angles are determined by the SES according to the pan (or azimuthal) and tilt (or elevation) angles at which the data was found. Also, a time stamp is registered with the relevant data. The retrieve data using data name function queries the database using the specified name. This query returns all records in the database that contain the given name. All data is returned to the requesting agent. The retrieve data using data type function is like the previous function, but the query uses the data type instead of name. The retrieve data using location function determines the vertices to query from using the specified location and the neighborhood depth in which to search. When all vertices are determined, the query is placed and all records at the specified vertices are returned.
In another embodiment, the database consists of two tables wherein a vertex table holds the vertex angles and their indices and a data table holds all registered data. When the SES is created, the manager creates the vertices for the projection interface. Each vertex in the vertex table holds an azimuthal angle, an elevation angle, and indices uniquely identifying each vertex. The manager communicates with outside agents of the control system and relays the requests generated to the database. The manager can receive one of four requests from any agent: post data, retrieve data using data name, retrieve data using data type and retrieve data using location. The post function takes all relevant data from the requesting agent and registers this data in the database at the correct vertex location. The retrieve data using data name function queries the database using the specified name. This query returns all records in the database that contain the given name. All data is returned to the requesting agent. The retrieve data using data type function is similar to the retrieve data using data name function but the query uses the data type instead of name. The retrieve data using location function uses the indices and angles stored in the vertex table. The desired location specified in the request is converted into a vertex on the SES. The indices for this vertex are located, and all indices falling within the desired neighborhood of the initial location are collected. The angles matching these indices are then used in a query to the main database holding registered data. All information at these locations is returned to the requesting component.
In addition to post and retrieve agents, other agents may perform functions such as data analysis or data display on the information stored in the SES through the use of the post and retrieve agents.
As each SPM agent writes to a vertex on the SES, an attention agent searches through the vertex list to find the most active vertex, referred to as the focus vertex. High activity at a vertex, or a group of vertices, is a very rapid method of focusing the robot to an event in the environment that may be relevant to the robot without processing the information in all the vertices of the SES first. In one embodiment of the present invention, the attention agent identifies the focus vertex by finding the vertex with the highest number of SPM messages.
In a preferred embodiment, the attention agent weights the information written to the SES, determines an activation value of each message based, in part, on the currently executing behavior, and identifies the focus vertex as the vertex with the highest activation value. If the currently executing behavior terminates normally (the post-condition state is satisfied), the attention agent should expect to see the post-condition state and can sensitize portions of the SES to the occurrence of the post-condition state such that SPM data written to the sensitized portion of the SES are given a greater weight or activity. Each SPM may also be biased, based on the currently executing behavior from a database associative memory (DBAM), to give more weight to expected SPM signals.
For example, a currently executing behavior may have a post-condition state that expects to see a red object 45° to the left of the current heading. The attention agent would sensitize the vertices in the region surrounding the 45° left of current heading such that any SPM data written to those vertices are assigned an activity that is, for example, 50% higher than activities at the other vertices. Similarly, the SPM that detects red objects in the environment would write messages having an activity level that is, for example, 50% greater than the activity levels of other SPMs.
An event in the environment might stimulate several sensors simultaneously, but the messages from the various SPMs will be written to the SES at different times because of the varying delays (latencies) associated with each particular sensor. For example, finding a moving edge in an image sequence will take longer than detecting motion with an IR sensor array. A coincidence detection agent may be trained to account for the varying sensor delays using training techniques known to one of skill in the art such that messages received by the SES within an interval of time are identified as responses to a single event.
In addition to the SPM data written to a vertex, a vertex may also contain links to behaviors stored in the DBAM. Landmark mapping agents may also write to the SES, storing a pointer to an object descriptor at the vertex where the object is expected. Objects may be tracked during robot movement on the SES using transformations such as those described in Peters, R. A. II, K. E. Hambuchen, K. Kawamura, and D. M. Wilkes, “The Sensory Ego-Sphere as a Short-Term Memory for Humanoids”, Proc. IEEE-RAS Int'l. Conf. on Humanoid Robots, pp. 451-459, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, Nov. 22-24, 2001 herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.
The ability to place an expected object onto the SES and to track objects enables the robot to know what to expect and to remember and recall where objects it has passed should be. The ability to recall passed objects also enables the robot to backtrack to a previous state if a sudden event causes the robot to “get lost” in the sense that a sudden event may displace the state of the robot to a point far from the robot's active map prior to the event.
The ability to place an object onto the SES provides the robot the capability for ego-centric navigation. The placement of three objects on the SES allows the robot to triangulate its current position and the capability of placing the goal state on the SES allows the robot to calculate the goal with respect to its current position.
The objects placed in the SES may also originate from sources external to the robot such as, for example, from another robot. This allows the robot to “know” the location of objects it cannot directly view.
The information written to the focus vertex is vector encoded to a current state vector and passed to the DBAM. The current state vector is used in the DBAM to terminate or continue the currently executing behavior and to activate the succeeding behavior.
Actuator controls are activated by executing behavior agents retrieved from the DBAM. Each behavior is stored as a record in the DBAM and is executed by an independent behavior agent. When the robot is operating in an autonomous mode and performing a task, the currently executing behavior agent receives information from the SES. The currently executing behavior agent either continues executing the current behavior if the SES information corresponds to the state expected by the current behavior or terminates the current behavior if the SES information corresponds to the post-condition state of the current behavior. The currently executing behavior may also be terminated by a simple time-out criteria.
Upon identifying a termination condition, the succeeding behavior is selected by propagation of activation signals between the behaviors linked to the currently executing behavior. Restricting the search space to only the behaviors that are linked to the currently executing behavior, instead of all of the behaviors in the DBAM, significantly reduces the search time for the succeeding behavior such that real-time responsiveness is exhibited by the robot.
Each of the behaviors linked to the current behavior computes the vector-space distance between the current state and its own pre-condition state. Each behavior propagates an inhibitory signal (by adding a negative number to the activation term) that is inversely proportional to the computed distance to the other linked behaviors. The propagation of the inhibitory signal between the linked behaviors has the effect that, in most instances, the behavior with the highest activation term is also the behavior whose pre-condition state most closely matches the current state of the robot.
The links between behaviors are created by the SAN agent during task planning but may also be created by a dream agent during the dream state. The links are task dependent and different behaviors may be linked together depending on the assigned goal.
When the robot is tasked to achieve a goal, the spreading activation network (SAN) agent constructs a sequence of behaviors that will take the robot from its current state to the goal state (active map) in the DBAM by back-propagating from the goal state to the current state. For each behavior added to the active map, the SAN agent performs a search for behaviors that have a pre-condition state close to the post-condition state of the added behavior and adds a link connecting the close behavior to the added behavior. An activation term characterizing the link and based on the inverse vector space distance between the linked behaviors is also added to the added behavior. The SAN agent may create several paths connecting the current state to the goal state.
A command context agent enables the robot to receive a goal defined task and to transition the robot between active mode, dream mode, and training mode.
During periods of mechanical inactivity when not performing or learning a task or when the current task does not use the full processing capabilities of the robot, the robot may transition to a dream state. While in the dream state, the robot modifies or creates new behaviors based on its most recent activities and creates new scenarios (behavior sequences never before executed by the robot) for possible execution during future activity.
Each time the robot dreams, the dream agent analyzes R(t) for the recent active period since the last dream state by identifying episode boundaries and episodes. Each recent episode is first compared to existing behaviors in the DBAM to confirm if the recent episode is another instance of the existing behavior. The comparison may be based on the average distance or end-point distances between the recent episode and the existing behavior or any other like criteria. If the episode is close to the behavior, the behavior may be modified to account for the new episode.
If the episode is distinct from the existing behaviors, the dream agent creates a new behavior based on the episode and finds and creates links to the nearest behaviors. The default activation link to the nearest existing behaviors may be based, in part, on the number of episodes represented in the exemplar behavior such that a new behavior generated from a single episode may be assigned a smaller activation value than behaviors generated from many episodes. The new behavior is added to the DBAM for possible future execution.
If a robot is limited to behavior sequences learned only through teleoperation or other known training techniques, the robot may not be able to respond to a new situation. In a preferred embodiment, a dream agent is activated during periods of mechanical inactivity and creates new plausible behavior sequences that may allow the robot, during its active state, to react purposefully and positively to contingencies never before experienced. The dream agent randomly selects a pairs of behaviors from the DBAM and computes the endpoint distances between the selected behaviors. The endpoint distances are the distances between the pre-condition state of one behavior and the post-condition state of the other behavior. The distance may be a vector distance or any appropriate measure known to one of skill in the art. If the computed distance is less than a cut-off distance, the preceding behavior (the behavior with the post-condition state close to the succeeding behavior's pre-condition state) is modified to include a link to the succeeding behavior.
The robots of Pfeifer and Cohen must be trained to identify episodes that lead to the accomplishment of a task. The training usually involves an external handler that observes and rewards robot behaviors that advance the robot through the completion of the task. The robot either makes a random move or a best estimate move and receives positive or negative feedback from the handler depending on whether the move advances the robot toward the goal. This move-feedback cycle must be repeated for each step toward the goal. The advantage of such a training program is that robot learns both actions that lead toward a goal and actions that do not accomplish a goal. The disadvantage of such a system is that the training time is very long because in addition to learning how to accomplish a task, the robot learns many more methods of not accomplishing a task.
A more efficient method of learning a task is to teach the robot only the tasks required to accomplish a goal. Instead of allowing the robot to make random moves, the robot is guided through the completion of the task by an external handler via teleoperation. During teleoperation, the handler controls all actions of the robot while the robot records the state (sensor and actuator information) of the robot during the teleoperation. The task is repeated several times under slightly different conditions to allow the formation of episode clusters for later analysis. After one or more training trials, the robot is placed in the dream state where the recorded state information is analyzed by the robot to identify episodes, episode boundaries, and to create exemplar episodes for each episode cluster.